A FAULKNER FABLE

To Leslie Tripathy

A FAULKNER FABLE

Tonight I sit here
full of the sound of fury,
listening to
Hemingway's gun firing
far off in the green
hills on the other side of paradise.
I shut my eyes
like the "Calico Cat,"
blinking blizzards of tears
for those coughing
internal laughs...

Don Quixote rode out
charging a windmill--
I
only push a pen,
plying a craft
that often
seems to sink.

Van Gogh painted
flaming yellows --
haystacks, wheat fields,
ears of corn,
bleached yellow
under burning suns
of artistic passion.
I burn internally
like those in Dante's depths.

Robinson Jeffers
captured the hawk
soaring in fight,
and Gerald Manley
Hopkins caught
the hop, hop, hopping
of the robin,
while I
can only eye
the six foot three
of Alice
with wonder.

Dragons surface
in anger from
twenty thousand leagues
and shout about
women in love,
sons and lovers,
but such emotions
have no place under
the pillars of wisdom
where I lie.

Rather that we
honor Balzac,
or become
pathfinders of
lost horizons,
where art flows
like rivers,
and men marry
images carried
from times past
in Jungian genes.

Tomorrow I will write
another poem,
wearing out pencils,
bearing out truths,
and it matters not even
if mine be only windmills.
I am a poet
chronicling my age --

Of war and peace,
inflation and sublimation,
crime and punishment,
unemployment and
dying elephants screaming
at the guns, that take
their ivory to build towers

to false gods
driving cadillacs
and sport cars
over cliffs,
never reaching that great
Kafkian castle in the sky.

Dogs howl tonight
at the racoon
sitting on my back
door step.
he comes in peace,
but wears a mask,
like me,
and that is why
I sit here,
flaming fire,
scribbling absurdities
that fill the empty night
and erase my loneliness
to silence.

Ruth Wildes Schuler